[NYTr] The Myth of "Al Qaeda" in Iraq

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Washington Monthly - Oct, 2007
http://www2.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0710.tilghman.html

The Myth of AQI

Fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq is the last big argument for keeping U.S.
troops in the country. But the military's estimation of the threat is
alarmingly wrong. 

By Andrew Tilghman

In March 2007, a pair of truck bombs tore through the Shiite
marketplace in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, killing more than
150 people. The blast reduced the ancient city center to rubble,
leaving body parts and charred vegetables scattered amid pools of
blood. It was among the most lethal attacks to date in the
five-year-old Iraq War. Within hours, Iraqi officials in Baghdad had
pinned the bombing on al-Qaeda, and news reports from Reuters, the BBC,
MSNBC, and others carried those remarks around the world. An Internet
posting by the terrorist group known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) took
credit for the destruction. Within a few days, U.S. Army General David
Petraeus publicly blamed AQI for the carnage, accusing the group of
trying to foment sectarian violence and ignite a civil war. Back in
Washington, pundits latched on to the attack with special interest, as
President Bush had previously touted a period of calm in Tal Afar as
evidence that the military's retooled counterinsurgency doctrine was
working. For days, reporters and bloggers debated whether the attacks
signaled a "resurgence" of al-Qaeda in the city.

Yet there's reason to doubt that AQI had any role in the bombing. In
the weeks before the attack, sectarian tensions had been simmering
after a local Sunni woman told Al Jazeera television that she had been
gang-raped by a group of Shiite Iraqi army soldiers. Multiple insurgent
groups called for violence to avenge the woman's honor. Immediately
after the blast, some in uniform expressed doubts about al-Qaeda's
alleged role and suggested that homegrown sectarian strife was more
likely at work. "It's really not al-Qaeda who has infiltrated so much
as the fact [of] what happened in 2003," said Ahmed Hashim, a professor
at the Naval War College who served as an Army political adviser to the
3rd Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar until shortly before the bombing. "The
formerly dominant Sunni Turkmen majority there," he told PBS's NewsHour
With Jim Lehrer soon after the bombing, "suddenly ... felt themselves
having been thrown out of power. And this is essentially their revenge."

Subscribe Online & Save 33%A week later, Iraqi security forces raided a
home outside Tal Afar andarrested two men suspected of orchestrating
the bombing. Yet when the U.S. military issued a press release about
the arrests, there was no mention of an al-Qaeda connection. The
suspects were never formally charged, and nearly six months later
neither the U.S. military nor Iraqi police are certain of the source of
the attacks. In recent public statements, the military has backed off
its former allegations that al-Qaeda was responsible, instead
asserting, as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Donnelly wrote in response to
an inquiry from the Washington Monthly, that "the tactics used in this
attack are consistent with al-Qaeda."

This scenario has become common. After a strike, the military rushes to
point the finger at al-Qaeda, even when the actual evidence remains
hazy and an alternative explanation—raw hatred between local Sunnis and
Shiites—might fit the circumstances just as well. The press blasts such
dubious conclusions back to American citizens and policy makers in
Washington, and the incidents get tallied and quantified in official
reports, cited by the military in briefings in Baghdad. The White House
then takes the reports and crafts sound bites depicting AQI as the
number one threat to peace and stability in Iraq. (In July, for
instance, at Charleston Air Force Base, the president gave a speech
about Iraq that mentioned al-Qaeda ninety-five times.)

By now, many in Washington have learned to discount the president's
rhetorical excesses when it comes to the war. But even some of his
harshest critics take at face value the estimates provided by the
military about AQI's presence. Politicians of both parties point to
such figures when forming their positions on the war. All of the top
three Democratic presidential candidates have argued for keeping some
American forces in Iraq or the region, citing among other reasons the
continued threat from al-Qaeda.

But what if official military estimates about the size and impact of
al-Qaeda in Iraq are simply wrong? Indeed, interviews with numerous
military and intelligence analysts, both inside and outside of
government, suggest that the number of strikes the group has directed
represent only a fraction of what official estimates claim. Further,
al-Qaeda's presumed role in leading the violence through uniquely
devastating attacks that catalyze further unrest may also be overstated.

Having been led astray by flawed prewar intelligence about WMDs,
official Washington wants to believe it takes a more skeptical view of
the administration's information now. Yet Beltway insiders seem to be
making almost precisely the same mistakes in sizing up al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Despite President Bush's near-singular focus on al-Qaeda in Iraq, most
in Washington understand that instability on the ground stems from
multiple sources. Numerous attacks on both U.S. troops and Iraqi
civilians have been the handiwork of Shiite militants, often connected
to, or even part of, the Iraqi government. Opportunistic criminal gangs
engage in some of the same heinous tactics.

The Sunni resistance is also comprised of multiple groups. The first
consists of so-called "former regime elements." These include thousands
of ex-officers from Saddam's old intelligence agency, the Mukabarat,
and from the elite paramilitary unit Saddam Fedayeen. Their primary
goal is to drive out the U.S. occupation and install a Sunni-led
government hostile to Iranian influence. Some within this broad group
support reconciliation with the current government or negotiations with
the United States, under the condition that American forces set a
timetable for a troop withdrawal.

The second category consists of homegrown Iraqi Sunni religious groups,
such as the Mujahadeen Army of Iraq. These are native Iraqis who aim to
install a religious-based government in Baghdad, similar to the regime
in Tehran. These groups use religious rhetoric and terrorist tactics
but are essentially nationalistic in their aims.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq comprises the third group. The terrorist network was
founded in 2003 by the now-dead Jordanian militant Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. (The extent of the group's organizational ties to Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda is hotly debated, but the organizations share a
worldview and set of objectives.) AQI is believed to have the most
non-Iraqis in its ranks, particularly among its leadership. However,
most recent assessments say the rank and file are mostly radicalized
Iraqis. AQI, which calls itself the "Islamic State of Iraq," espouses
the most radical form of Islam and calls for the imposition of strict
sharia, or Islamic law. The group has no plans for a future Iraqi
government and instead hopes to create a new Islamic caliphate with
borders reaching far beyond Mesopotamia.

The essential questions are: How large is the presence of AQI, in terms
of manpower and attacks instigated, and what role does the group play
in catalyzing further violence? For the first question, the military
has produced an estimate. In a background briefing this July in
Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this
year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq. That figure was
also cited in the military intelligence report during final
preparations for a National Intelligence Estimate in July.

This is the number on which many military experts inside the Beltway
rely. Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at
the Brookings Institution who attended the Baghdad background briefing,
explained that he thought the estimate derived from a comprehensive
analysis by teams of local intelligence agents who examine the type and
location of daily attacks, and their intended targets, and crosscheck
that with reports from Iraqi informants and other data, such as
intercepted phone calls. "It's a fairly detailed kind of assessment,"
O'Hanlon said. "Obviously you can't always know who is behind an
attack, but there is a fairly systematic way of looking at the attacks
where they can begin to make a pretty informed guess."

Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more
circumspect view. Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an
intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real
uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. "It was
kind of a running joke in our office," he recalls. "We would
sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda."

To describe AQI's presence, intelligence experts cite a spectrum of
estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such "a
big window" exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA's
Counterterrorism Center, indicates that "[those experts] really don't
have a very good perception of what is going on."

It's notable that military intelligence reports have opted to cite a
figure at the very top of that range. But even the low estimate of 8
percent may be an overstatement, if you consider some of the
government's own statistics.

The first instructive set of data comes from the U.S.-sponsored Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty. In March, the organization analyzed the
online postings of eleven prominent Sunni insurgent groups, including
AQI, tallying how many attacks each group claimed. AQI took credit for
10 percent of attacks on Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias
(forty-three out of 439 attacks), and less than 4 percent of attacks on
U.S. troops (seventeen out of 357). Although these Internet postings
should not be taken as proof positive of the culprits, it's instructive
to remember that PR-conscious al-Qaeda operatives are far more likely
to overstate than understate their role.

When turning to the question of manpower, military officials told the
New York Times in August that of the roughly 24,500 prisoners in U.S.
detention facilities in Iraq (nearly all of whom are Sunni), just
1,800—about 7 percent—claim allegiance to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Moreover,
the composition of inmates does not support the assumption that large
numbers of foreign terrorists, long believed to be the leaders and most
hard-core elements of AQI, are operating inside Iraq. In August,
American forces held in custody 280 foreign nationals—slightly more
than 1 percent of total inmates.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), which
arguably has the best track record for producing accurate intelligence
assessments, last year estimated that AQI's membership was in a range
of "more than 1,000." When compared with the military's estimate for
the total size of the insurgency—between 20,000 and 30,000 full-time
fighters—this figure puts AQI forces at around 5 percent. When compared
with Iraqi intelligence's much larger estimates of the
insurgency—200,000 fighters—INR's estimate would put AQI forces at less
than 1 percent. This year, the State Department dropped even its
base-level estimate, because, as an official explained, "the
information is too disparate to come up with a consensus number."

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes
from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a
twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with
military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He
believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2
percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq,"
according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

So how did the military come up with an estimate of 15 percent, when
government data and many of the intelligence community's own analysts
point to estimates a fraction of that size? The problem begins at the
top. When the White House singles out al-Qaeda in Iraq for special
attention, the bureaucracy responds by creating procedures that hunt
down more evidence of the organization. The more manpower assigned to
focus on the group, the more evidence is uncovered that points to it
lurking in every shadow. "When you have something that is really hot,
the leaders start tasking everyone to look into that," explains W.
Patrick Lang, a retired U.S. Army colonel and former head of Middle
East intelligence analysis for the Department of Defense. "Whoever is
at the top of the pyramid says, 'Make me a briefing showing what
al-Qaeda in Iraq is doing,' and then the decision maker says, 'Aha, I
knew I was right.'"

With disproportionate resources dedicated to tracking AQI, the search
has become a self-reinforcing loop. The Army has a Special Operations
task force solely dedicated to tracking al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Defense
Intelligence Agency tracks AQI through its Iraq office and its
counterterrorism office. The result is more information culled, more
PowerPoint slides created, and, ultimately, more attention drawn to
AQI, which amplifies its significance in the minds of military and
intelligence officers. "Once people look at everything through that
lens, al-Qaeda is all they see," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA
officer who also worked at the U.S. State Department's Office of
Counterterrorism. "It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

Ground-level analysts in the field, facing pressures from superiors to
document AQI's handiwork, might be able to question such assumptions if
they had strong intelligence networks on the ground. Unfortunately,
that's rarely the case. The intelligence community's efforts are
hobbled by too few Arabic speakers in their ranks and too many
unreliable informants in Iraqi communities, rendering a hazy picture
that is open to interpretations.

Because uncertainty exists, the bar for labeling an attack the work of
al-Qaeda can be very low. The fact that a detainee possesses al-Qaeda
pamphlets or a laptop computer with cached jihadist Web sites, for
example, is at times enough for analysts to link a detainee to
al-Qaeda. "Sometimes it's as simple as an anonymous tip that al-Qaeda
is active in a certain village, so they will go out on an operation and
whoever they roll up, we call them al-Qaeda," says Alex Rossmiller.
"People can get labeled al-Qaeda anywhere along in the chain of events,
and it's really hard to unlabel them." Even when the military backs off
explicit statements that AQI is responsible, as with the Tal Afar truck
bombings, the perception that an attack is the work of al-Qaeda is
rarely corrected.

The result can be baffling for the troops working on the ground, who
hear the leadership characterizing the conflict in Iraq in ways that do
not necessarily match what they see in the dusty and danger-laden
villages. Michael Zacchea, a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Reserves
who was deployed to Iraq, said he was sometimes skeptical of
upper-level analysis emphasizing al-Qaeda in Iraq rather than the
insurgency's local roots. "It's very, very frustrating for everyone
involved who is trying to do the right thing," he said. "That's not how
anyone learned to play the game when we were officers coming up the
ranks, and we were taught to provide clear battlefield analysis."

Even if the manpower and number of attacks attributed to AQI have been
exaggerated—and they have—many observers maintain that what is uniquely
dangerous about the group is not its numbers, but the spectacular
nature of its strikes. While homegrown Sunni and Shiite militias engage
for the most part in tit-for-tat violence to forward sectarian ends,
AQI's methods are presumed to be different—more dramatic, more
inflammatory, and having a greater ripple effect on the country's
fragile political environment. "The effect of al-Qaeda has been far
beyond the numbers that they field," explains Thomas Donnelly, resident
fellow for defense and national security at the American Enterprise
Institute in Washington. "The question is, What attacks are likely to
have the most destabilizing political and strategic affects?" He
points, as do many inside the administration, to the February 2006
bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara, a revered Shiite shrine, as a
paramount example of AQI's outsize influence. President Bush has laid
unqualified blame for the Samara bombing on al-Qaeda, and described the
infamous incident—and ensuing sectarian violence—as a fatal tipping
point toward the current unrest.

But is this view of AQI's vanguard role in destabilizing Iraq really
true? There are three reasons to question that belief.

First, although spectacular attacks were a distinctive AQI hallmark
early in the war, the group has since lost its monopoly on bloody
fireworks. After five years of shifting alliances, cross-pollination of
tactics, and copycat attacks, other insurgent groups now launch equally
dramatic and politically charged attacks. For example, a second
explosion at the Samara mosque in June 2007, which destroyed the
shrine's minarets and sparked a wave of revenge attacks on Sunni
mosques nationwide, may have been an inside job. U.S. military
officials said fifteen uniformed men from the Shiite-run Iraqi Security
Forces were arrested for suspected involvement in the attack.

Second, it remains unclear whether the original Samara bombing was
itself the work of AQI. The group never took credit for the attack, as
it has many other high-profile incidents. The man who the military
believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was
both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official
under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi,
was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's
army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an
AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even
kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which
are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated
explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among
former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive
tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power
base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the
insurgency. Frank "Greg" Ford, a retired counterintelligence agent for
the Army Reserves, who worked with the Army in Samara before the 2006
bombing, says that the evidence points away from AQI and toward a
different conclusion: "The Baathists directed that attack," says Ford.

Third, while some analysts believe that AQI drafts Baathist insurgents
to carry out its attacks, other intelligence experts think it is the
other way around. In other words, they see evidence of native insurgent
forces coopting the steady stream of delusional extremists seeking
martyrdom that AQI brings into Iraq. "Al-Qaeda can't operate anywhere
in Iraq without kissing the ring of the former regime," says Nance.
"They can't move car bombs full of explosives and foreign suicide
bombers through a city without everyone knowing who they are. They need
to be facilitated." Thus new foreign fighters "come through and some
local Iraqis will say, 'Okay, why don't you go down to the Ministry of
Defense building downtown.'" AQI recruits often find themselves taking
orders from a network of former regime insurgents, who assemble their
car bombs and tell them what to blow up. They become, as Nance says,
"puppets for the other insurgent groups."

The view that AQI is neither as big nor as lethal as commonly believed
is widespread among working-level analysts and troops on the ground. A
majority of those interviewed for this article believe that the
military's AQI estimates are overblown to varying degrees. If such
misgivings are common, why haven't doubts pricked the public debate?
The reason is that alternate views are running up against an echo
chamber of powerful players all with an interest in hyping AQI's role.

The first group that profits from an outsize focus on AQI are former
regime elements, and the tribal chiefs with whom they are often allied.
These forces are able to carry out attacks against Shiites and
Americans, but also to shift the blame if it suits their purposes.
While the U.S. military has recently touted "news" that Sunni
insurgents have turned against the al-Qaeda terrorists in Anbar
Province, there is little evidence of actual clashes between these two
groups. Sunni insurgents in Anbar have largely ceased attacks on
Americans, but some observers suggest that this development has less to
do with vanquishing AQI than with the fact that U.S. troops now
routinely deliver cash-filled duffle bags to tribal sheiks serving as
"lead contractors" on "reconstruction projects." The excuse of fighting
AQI comes in handy. "Remember, Iraq is an honor society," explains Juan
Cole, an Iraq expert and professor of modern Middle Eastern studies at
the University of Michigan. "But if you say it wasn't us—it was
al-Qaeda—then you don't lose face."

The second benefactor is the government of Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki, often the first to blame specific attacks on AQI. Talking
about "al-Qaeda" offers the government a politically correct way of
talking about Sunni violence without seeming to blame the Sunnis
themselves, to whom they are ostensibly trying to reach out in a unity
government. On a deeper level, however, the al-Maliki regime has very
limited popular support, and the government officials and ruling
Islamic Dawa Party feel an imperative to include Iraqi troubles in the
broader "global war in terrorism" in order to keep U.S. troops in the
country. In June, when faced with increasingly uncomfortable pressure
from the Americans for his failure to resolve key political issues,
al-Maliki warned that Iraqi intelligence had found evidence of a
"widespread and dangerous plan by the terrorist al-Qaeda organization"
to mount attacks outside of Iraq.

Elsewhere within the Shiite bloc of Iraqi politics, Moqtada al-Sadr has
his own reasons for playing up the idea of AQI. "The Sadrists want to
overstate the role of al-Qaeda in a way to emphasize on the
'foreignness' of the current problem in Iraq; and this easily fits
their anti-occupation ideology, which seems to gain more popularity
among Shia Iraqis on a daily basis," said Babak Rahimi, a professor of
Islamic Studies and expert in Shiite politics at the University of
California at San Diego.

Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain eager to take
credit for the violence in Iraq, despite the bad blood that existed
between bin Laden and AQI's slain founder, al-Zarqawi. They've produced
a long series of taped statements in recent years taunting U.S. leaders
and attempting to conflate their operations with the Sunni resistance
in Iraq. "They want to bring this all together as a motivating tool to
encourage recruitment," said Farhana Ali, a terrorism expert at the
RAND Corporation.

The press has also been complicit in inflating the threat of AQI.
Because of the danger on the ground, reporters struggle to do the kind
of comprehensive field reporting that's necessary to check facts and
question statements from military spokespersons and Iraqi politicians.
Today, for example, U.S. reporters rarely travel independently outside
central Baghdad. Few, if any, insurgents have ever given interviews to
Western reporters. These limitations are understandable, if
unfortunate. But news organizations are reluctant to admit their
confines in obtaining information. Ambiguities are glossed over;
allegations are presented as facts. Besides, it's undeniably in the
reporter's own interest to keep "al-Qaeda attacks" in the headline,
because it may move their story from A16 to A1.

Finally, no one has more incentive to overstate the threat of AQI than
President Bush and those in the administration who argue for keeping a
substantial military presence in Iraq. Insistent talk about AQI aims to
place the Iraq War in the context of the broader war on terrorism.
Pointing to al-Qaeda in Iraq helps the administration leverage
Americans' fears about terrorism and residual anger over the attacks of
September 11. It is perhaps one of the last rhetorical crutches the
president has left to lean on.

This is not to say that al-Qaeda in Iraq doesn't pose a real danger,
both to stability in Iraq and to security in the United States. Today
multiple Iraqi insurgent groups target U.S. forces, with the aim of
driving out the occupation. But once our troops withdraw, most Sunni
resistance fighters will have no impetus to launch strikes on American
soil. In that regard, al-Qaeda—and AQI, to the extent it is affiliated
with bin Laden's network—is unique. The group's leadership consists
largely of foreign fighters, and its ideology and ambitions are global.
Al-Qaeda fighters trained in Baghdad may one day use those skills to
plot strikes aimed at Boston.

Yet it's not clear that the best way to counter this threat is with
military action in Iraq. AQI's presence is tolerated by the country's
Sunni Arabs, historically among the most secular in the Middle East,
because they have a common enemy in the United States. Absent this
shared cause, it's not clear that native insurgents would still welcome
AQI forces working to impose strict sharia. In Baghdad, any near-term
functioning government will likely be an alliance of Shiites and Kurds,
two groups unlikely to accept organized radical Sunni Arab militants
within their borders. Yet while precisely predicting future political
dynamics in Iraq is uncertain, one thing is clear now: the continued
American occupation of Iraq is al-Qaeda's best recruitment tool, the
lure to hook new recruits. As RAND's Ali said, "What inspires jihadis
today is Iraq."

Five years ago, the American public was asked to support the invasion
of Iraq based on the false claim that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked
to al-Qaeda. Today, the erroneous belief that al-Qaeda's franchise in
Iraq is a driving force behind the chaos in that country may be setting
us up for a similar mistake.

[Andrew Tilghman was an Iraq correspondent for the Stars and Stripes
newspaper in 2005 and 2006.]